


Review of BattleStar Galatica Prequel RAZOR

by shadowkat67



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Buffy the Vampire Slayer References, Episode Review, Films, Literary References & Allusions, Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:48:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23088034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowkat67/pseuds/shadowkat67
Summary: "Sometimes you have to be willing to do the untenable in order to survive. You have to be willing to become a RAZOR."Review of the prequel - RAZOR for BattleStar Galatica
Kudos: 4
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	Review of BattleStar Galatica Prequel RAZOR

"Sometimes you have to be willing to do the untenable in order to survive. You have to be willing to become a RAZOR."

The two hour _BattleStar Galatica_ prequel _Razor_ \- takes place during Lee Adama's first mission commanding the BattleStar Pegasus. It also concerns two flashbacks - the more lengthy one takes place ten months prior on the Pegasus after the big Cylon Attack, with Admiral Helena Cain in charge, the shorter one concerns Bill Adama's mission during the first Cylon War. We only get a bit of the Bill Adama mission - the rest of it can be seen online at Sci-Fi.com in 2 minute websodes. The bit concerning Helena Cain is shown via the pov of one of her Lieutants, Kendra, who becomes in the present storyline Lee's X/O or second in command. 

The story is not an easy one to watch subject matter wise, if you did not cringe during it - there's something wrong with you (or methinks you may be playing one too many violent video games) - but I remained riveted to the screen throughout, often rewinding bits and pieces of it. My attention like with most BSG episodes never wandered. I tried to knit during it, but gave up. That's how well done it was - BSG continues to raise the bar when it comes to television acting, production, sound, direction, and writing. Also, Michelle Forbes, Tricia Helfer, and Katee Sackoff are amazing in this episode. The guys are good too, but this one is the women's show. Another thing I adore about BSG - it allows women to be as violently brutal as men. These roles could be played by either gender with similar results. One of the few tv shows that makes that clear and pushes past traditional gender stereotypes.

BSG unlike most tv shows that deal with violence, makes it real. The consequences bruise the viewer. There's no neat wrap-up. The heroes and villians are not clearly delineated. And we often wonder who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. It is not a "feel-good" show so much as one that makes you ponder things long after the screen has gone dark. 

The film starts with an image of a solider's red pocket knife - its razor sharp edge flipping against a black screen, with a female voice over, I'm assuming Kendra's, explaining what you have to become in order to survive warfare. Within those five minutes, we are told what the issue is - and it is by no means a new one. Joseph Conrad wrote about it in _Heart of Darkness_ and Francis Ford Coppola filmed it in _Apocalypse Now_. If you are a Buffy fan, Joss Whedon referred to it with tongue in cheek humor. 

"When looking into the abyss, be careful the abyss doesn't look back into you."

or "When fighting monsters, be careful not to become them."

[Easier said than done. If history has anything to say about it.]

Helena Cain is the rogue fighter at the center of Conrad's tale, and Coppola's. The fighter who became a monster, who stripped herself of humanity, in order to think like the enemy she perceived that she was fighting. She becomes a sword of vengeance. And in Razor we watch through Kendra's eyes the decisions, choices, and occurrences that strip that humanity away from them both.

The first is the attack on the Pegasus killing friends and forcing them to flee into jump space.

The second is the news that their homeland is devastated. Nuked. The fleet gone. No survivors.

The third is Cain's choice not to run but to fight, to become vengeance and her crews decision to back her.

At first she states this is not going to be a mad act of vengeance. But she is surrounded by people she believes she can trust. She's in a loving relationship with Gina (her network admin) and close to her x/o or second in command. 

Then an opportunity presents itself to attack the Cylons. She is given the plans by Gina (portrayed by Tricia Helfner who also plays Six, and we the viewer know is a cylon). To do the attack - Kendra and Gina program the system, and Kendra provides Gina with the access codes. 

Unfortunately - they fall into what appears to be a trap. The X/O suggests they flee. But Cain insists they fight even if it will cost them raiders. The X/O refuses, he can't in good conscience allow such a thing. Cain shoots him in the head for insubordination with his own gun - this is a man only a few weeks before she was joking with and had told her to get some shore leave. 

They go ahead with their plan - since no one else wants to die at Cain's hands - her ploy worked. Cylons board their ship. Kendra manages to kill a few and get people to safety, seeing a fleeing Gina, she tells her to get behind her, Gina passes her, and Kendra goes around the corner - only to run into Six - Gina's look-alike. Gina, Kendra realizes at that moment, is a cylon. Which means she gave her access codes to the enemy. Kendra goes to the bridge and outs Gina, shows the security footage. Cain faced with Gina's betrayal, goes cold and shouts in repulsion, "get that that thing off my brig". Later Cain tells Kendra that the codes weren't the most important thing Kendra gave the Cylon. Trust was. We both gave it our trust. It manipulated us. She turns to her interrogator, Thorn, and tells him that if it is so good at manipulating human emotions, and mimicing them, it must have a few of its own. It must have the capacity to feel. So - please make "it" feel pain, fear, degradation, and shame. Do what you must to ensure that. Gina stares at Cain through the glass, their eyes meet. The pain is evident in both.

It is tempting to think that it is this moment that Cain slides towards the very darkness that she condemns, starts to become the razor. But I think that moment started earlier - when she shot her X/O, making it clear to everyone on board that her word was law and she'd kill anyone who protested. Which of course makes it impossible for anyone to tell her at any point that she is wrong without taking their own lives into their hands. A Choice that Admiral Adama never makes. But as Adama tells his son, he is surrounded by people that Cain was not. His son. Saul. The President. People he can't easily kill, with the exception of possibly Saul. When you have a child, he tells his son, you have to face looking at yourself reflected in that child's eyes. You fear what that reflection will tell you. Cain did not have that. Perhaps Gina may have been for a bit that conscience - as she is for Baltar, but in Baltar's situation - Six gives her life to save Baltar, while Gina betrays Cain and eventually kills her in retribution for the torture Cain subjects her to as a result of the original betrayal.

(For anyone who has watched S2 and S3 of the series - we know that Adama often goes against the views of The President, Saul, and his son - and came very close a couple of times to killing all three. We also know that at the end of S3, he and Lee were not seeing eye-to-eye on anything. Yet, Adama still rejects the path Cain ultimately took. Also it's interesting that the writers went against the gender stereotype here - instead of the woman being the one who chooses not to become the razor, it is the man. Most tv shows, books, and movies would have done the opposite, heck Doctor Who certainly does - this in a nutshell is why BSG is so groundbreaking.)

What haunts me most though is the refrain at the end..."what has happened before, will happen again, and again, and again, again..." The vicious circle. Betrayal-Retribution-Retribution-Death-Rebirth-Betrayal-Retribution-Retribution...

One wonders what would have happened to Cain if she had made different choices? If Kendra had?

Kendra enters the cylon ship, finds a hybrid cylon at its center - the product of the cylons experiments with humans, and it asks her in a creepy god-like whisper, do you seek to be forgiven for past transgressions? She does. She led the assault on the civilian ship - as ordered by Cain. When the civilians they found resisted Cain's order to allow the Pegasus to take able-bodied crew, supplies, and equipement, leaving the remaining women, children, and infirm helpless - Kendra shot the man's wife in the head and the men next to her followed suit. 

Their faces haunt her. She attempts to escape with shots of heroine or some sort of drug to take the edge off. It is the reason she stays behind and manually arms the nuke to blow up the cylon hybrid ship that is still conducting experiments.

The experiments are a reminder that the cylons are no better in this conflict. It is also a homage to one of the more bleak episodes of the original version of BattleStar Galatica. Including the use of the old wobbly tin cylons from the series with the red light darting back and forth - flying the ships, as opposed to the nifty newer models accompanying the human cylons. In the original version - humans were taken to be food for an alien species in cohoots with the cylons - strapped in. Drugged. This version is in some ways more frightening than that one. We don't see everything - just the briefest suggestion - an arm cut off, a brain in a jar, people with wires inserted in their skin. It's more gruesome than Doctor Who's cybermen, because we see so little of it.

Did Cain and Kendra have a choice? Could they have chosen a different path? What would have happened if Kendra had merely shot Gina? OR Cain had just had her executed? Or what if they chose to do to Gina what Adama chose regarding Sharon? Would that have broken the cycle? Would it have mattered? Gina - we know - not only goes on to kill Cain, but also sets off a nuclear device which alerts the cylons to the humans whereabouts at the end of Season 2, causing them to be held captive on New Caprica. IS Cain partly responsible for that?

And to what degree do Cain and Kendra's choices define them? Cain tells Kendra not to look back. You can't. The choices you make, you make because you have to. We have no other alternative. Is she right?

Lee Adama wonders this. He wonders if he was correct to make a choice that would have killed everyone aboard the hybrid ship. A choice his father stopped him from making. Adama states that **we can't know what choice is the right one. We make the ones we have to make. And it is not up to us to judge those others made in circumstances we weren't privy to or in at the time. We can't know what we would have done in their place. That, he states, is up to a higher power, assuming of course there is one** \- he doesn't believe there is.

Then of course there's the bit about Kara Thrace. Who, the hybrid cylon warns Kendra, is the herald of death, the harbringer of the apocalypse. The human race must not follow Kara Thrace, if they do, she will lead them to their end. Do we trust the cylon? Destiny we are told at the end is not always what it seems. 

Cain tells Kendra that they must become razors to survive, to stay razors, until they have the luxury to become human again. To live human lives again. But I wonder if it is possible to go backwards? The cylons takes human prisoners, create hybrids from them - half human/half machine - cutting away the human flesh literally while Cain does it metaphorically. One can't help but wonder who is the most successful - Cain or the Cylons? Cain who systematically turns her crew and herself into a weapon, a war machine. Or the cylons with their gross experiments. Is Cain any better than the cylons Adama and Lee are fighting in past and present?

I can't help but think Cain's mistake was that she fought for the wrong reasons. Not to save her race. But to enact vengeance on its behalf. Vengeance never works. All it does is eat away at you, until you become little more than a machine to do its bidding.  
A razor. 

The episode was in my opinion among the best the series has had to offer. Driving home some of it's themes regarding the effects of warfare and violence on the human soul for good or ill. Like all BSG episodes it does not provide easy answers, just worrying questions - leaving it up to the viewer to come up with his or her own conclusions.


End file.
